Funeral Home Manager job description

More than half of the people running funeral homes work for themselves. The Occupational Outlook Handbook counted about 34,800 funeral home manager jobs in 2025 and found 58 percent of them held by self-employed workers and 40 percent by employers in death care services. The wage survey sees only managers on a payroll: BLS counted 13,910 of them in May 2025 at a median of $78,790, with a tenth of managers under $49,700 and a tenth over $156,400. O*NET's summary of the job covers planning and directing a funeral home's services and resources, including setting prices and managing the building.

Core Duties and Responsibilities

The manager's top-rated task is the same as a director's: sitting with the family to settle obituary wording, the casket, and the plan for the services. Scheduling funerals, burials, and cremations comes next, then carrying death certificates to medical offices for the signatures they need, and comforting the family throughout. The management layer comes on top of that. Managers check that operations comply with the rules, supervise embalmers, attendants, death certificate clerks, and cosmetologists, keep state-required documents and inventories, and sell services and merchandise. They also set prices and credit terms, negotiate prearranged funeral contracts, schedule staff hours, handle complaints and payment disputes, and change the service menu to meet the community's needs or lift revenue.

Common Skills and Technologies

Service orientation is the highest-rated skill for this job in O*NET, ahead of active listening and social perceptiveness. Reading comprehension, time management, critical thinking, and judgment and decision making follow, which is the business half showing. Microsoft Excel, Office, Outlook, PowerPoint, and Word are what hiring firms list, per O*NET, and O*NET's technology categories for the job include accounting, human resources, and video editing software.

Education, Training, and Career Path

Job Zone Three is where O*NET files the job. About half of respondents, 49.9 percent, said it calls for an associate's degree, 25.5 percent said a high school diploma, and 14.6 percent a postsecondary certificate. What the Handbook stresses is experience: managers typically spend several years as a funeral director or mortician first, so the license comes before the title. It projects manager jobs to grow 4 percent from 2025 to 2035, driven by people prearranging their own services, while the shift toward cremation holds demand back.

Sources: O*NET 30.0, 11-9171.00 Funeral Home Managers, https://www.onetonline.org/link/summary/11-9171.00. BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025, 11-9171, https://www.bls.gov/oes/tables.htm. BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook, Funeral Service Occupations, https://www.bls.gov/ooh/personal-care-and-service/funeral-service-occupations.htm.